Wikileaks.org under cyber attack, whistler blower reports

Wikileaks reports that its website has come under attack, but said U.S. diplomatic cables would still be published by several news agencies even if the site goes down.

The whistle blower website said on Twitter that its site has come under “a mass distributed denial of service attack” — a tactic that attempts to deny legitimate users from accessing a website, often by overloading the site with information.

Attempts to advance past the homepage of wikileaks.org resulted in an error page.

The Wikileaks Twitter feed also said that if the site goes down, news organizations including Spain’s El Pais newspaper, Le Monde in France, German magazine Der Spiegel, the U.K’s The Guardian and the New York Times will publish much of the material tonight.

The website has said there would be “seven times” as many secret documents as the 400,000 Iraq war logs released in October.

The diplomatic world has been buzzing all week as the United States warned allies that the impending release could cause embarrassment

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon was briefed earlier this week by U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson about the classified diplomatic messages that could “create tensions” among American allies, a spokesman told the Canadian Press.

Der Spiegel and French news site owni.fr said the release was expected at 4:30p.m. (EST) Sunday. However, the U.K.’s The Telegraph cited unnamed British government sources who said they expect the content would “drip out” over the course of the next week with Thursday focussing on Canadians’ “inferiority complex.”

Late Saturday, the U.S. State Department took the unusual step of releasing a letter to the lawyer of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange saying that the release could put “countless” lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies.

Theletter also said the U.S. government would not co-operate with WikiLeaks in trying to scrub the cables of information that might put sources and methods of intelligence gathering and diplomatic reporting at risk.

iPolitics will continue to follow this story and bring you the latest on what the releases mean for Canada.